Developer News

A new report out by IHS Screen Digest suggests that freemium is quickly becoming the dominant monetization model of the mobile ecosystem. It also says the in-app purchases that fuel the freemium model will climb from 39% of all app revenue in 2011 to 64% by 2015.

“Smartphone users overwhelmingly prefer free apps to paid apps, as we estimate 96 per cent of all smartphone apps were downloaded for free in 2011,” said Jack Kent, senior analyst with IHS. “In 2012, it will become increasingly difficult for app stores and developers to justify charging an upfront fee for their products when faced with competition from a plethora of free content. Instead, the apps industry must fully embrace the freemium model and monetize content through in-app purchases.”

While you may think of in-app content as relating only to games, there are a number of other examples. The app Doubletwist has a $3.99 add-on that gives you an equalizer and the ability to download album covers. Other apps, like navigation apps, have extra maps which cost money.

We here at GetJar have long been vocal proponents of the freemium model and have been predicting its success for some time, so this news comes as no surprise to us. What do you think? Do you use the freemium model? Let us know in the comments!

The holidays saw a huge spike in traffic on GetJar and our GetJar Gold Program continued to expand. GetJar Gold is a program that we created where we pay developers to distribute their Android apps for free on GetJar. First, we were ecstatic to announce a partnership with gaming giant Sega! Their decision to include the classic game Chu Chu Rocket in the program tells us we’re doing something special with GetJar Gold.

“With the continuing popularity of ChuChu Rocket!, we knew it was a perfect fit for the world’s largest free app store,” said Haruki Satomi, Senior Vice President of Digital Business at SEGA of America. “The game is such an ideal app for mobile devices, and we are very pleased by the opportunity to prove that to an ever-growing audience.”

For industries where a union doesn’t make sense, most lines of work have their own professional organization and now mobile development is no different. Jon Potter, former executive director of the Digital Media Association, announced the debut of the Application Developers Alliance. The ADA will begin promoting itself at the Consumer Electronic Show next week in Las Vegas. Potter says that the Alliance will give app developers an organization that will promote their interests as well as enable collaboration and offer product testing, education, cloud hosting, and governmental lobbying.

The Application Developers Alliance won’t restrict enrollment to mobile developers, so developers who work on other platforms, like web, are free to join. That said the organization is initially motivated toward issues relating to platforms like iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. Potter and his alliance have high aspirations. They’re looking to recruit thousands of developers by attending Meetups, conferences, and other events all over the country.

Services that the ADA plans to offer include:

Collaborative, online network

Product testing with access to the best platforms and tools

Group discounts and tutorials on all things mobile

Structured training and certification programs

Of all the potential benefits, lobbying power may be the best. Look for the ADA to weigh in on issues like privacy, IP, patents, and more.

While the only concrete partner currently on board is Rackspace, Potter expects Google and RIM to sign on. Naturally, such a potentially powerful organization will need some cash on hand to advance these issues, so the ADA expects to generate revenue through sponsors and, over time, membership fees.

StackMob offers a cloud-based backend-as-a-service development tool. While they’ve been in beta for about a year, they’ve seen 60% month to month growth since April. While they were primarily for iOS, they opened up their beta to Android developers, and is now available to all mobile developers. The company allows you to build, deploy and scale apps. The StackMob “Starter” supports one API version and between 60,000 to 4 million API calls and push notifications. The “Pro” package supports 10 API versions and 25 million API calls. Above that and you might as well just buy your own servers. All packages include REST API creation, push notifications, social integration, custom code and analytics provided by StackMob. The prices start at free and scale up accordingly. Get more information here, and let us know what you think if you check it out!

Earlier today we announced that GetJar now supports updates notifications for Android apps in a beta feature announcement. To enable an update, you’ll need to login to the Developer Zone. Then click on the publishing tab, and then click on Apps and Sites to see a list of your applications.

Click on edit on the app you want to update. Here you’ll see the normal options. You can click edit to edit screenshots or descriptions. You can upload new builds, or you can update an existing build by clicking (Update Build) under the build name.

Click browse, navigate to your build, and click open. Then, give the build a name. Below that you have the option to add a version name and description name. These are only for your reference, and are not seen by the public. We do, however, highly suggest using these fields as they will make your life easier in the long run. We enforce the package name to be the same. This is a requirement from Android OS which guarantees that your application will get upgraded rather than a duplicate application getting installed

Lastly on this page, you’ll see the targeting dialogue. We do not recommend changing the targeting here for a number of possible issues. For one, your new target may miss some users who will not get the update. Or you might expose a new API to older devices that are not compatible. If you need to restrict compatibility by device hardware, please create a new build with a new target.

And that’s it! Your app is now in the activation queue. After it has been approved, update notifications will begin rolling out to your users. The GetJar app on a user’s will ping our servers once ever eight hours to see if there are updates. If a user declines the update, a reminder will go out once a week for 3 weeks. After that, the user will no longer get a notification for that specific app.

While updates are in beta, there are some known limitations that you should be familiar with:

Consumers will get notified of new updates once every eight hours. They will receive one notification per update.

Earlier this week, version 3.5 of GetJar began rolling out to new users. This update allows for notifications. Users who have not upgraded to 3.5 will not be notified of any updates. When we are ready to take updates out of beta, we will begin notifying users of the easiest way to update to GetJar version 3.5.

Users will not be notified of updates for applications they’ve downloaded before installing GetJar version 3.5.

Uninstalling/Installing GetJar will cause update state to be lost.

Motorola Atrix owners will be asked to force close GetJar after an hour of running in the background. This messaged can be ignored. This is a known issue and will be fixed in the next version of GetJar.

We’ve got some great news for all of you Android developers. Our engineering team has been hard at work on your most requested feature, and it’s finally here. GetJar now supports update notifications for Android apps!

Updates from GetJar will help you do what you do best: make amazing apps and games. Before now, there was no easy way to automatically let all of your users know about the new version of your app. Your users had to know that you released an update and know to come to GetJar to download it. Now your push notifications will automatically go to users who downloaded your app from Getjar. Refer to this post for information and screenshots on how to upgrade your Android apps.

Updates have a lot of uses. Most of them are obvious, like adding new levels to game, adding a new feature to an app, or patching security hole. But have you ever thought of updates as an engagement tool? Sending out an update can be a friendly reminder about an app that a user may have forgotten about. Watch this blog for an upcoming post about best practices when it comes to updates.

We’ve been testing updates for the past few weeks, and while we are very proud of the work that’s been done, we do want to stress that this feature is in beta. The user-side update, GetJar version 3.5, began rolling out to new users last week and we’re happy to report that things look stable and sustainable.

GetJar Developers, we have a small request for you. Some changes are coming to the developer zone as we continue to make improvements on the GetJar experience. For this reason,we’re requesting that you login in to the Developer Zone today and make sure that your company name is up to date. At some future date, this information will be made available to users on your app’s product page. If you do not have a company name, the default name displayed will be the name your personal name that you signed up with when you created a GetJar Developer account. If you are a one person development team, we recommend coming up with a company name. If you’re having trouble, you can always call it Your Name, inc or something similar.

We’ve seen that this information increases trust, and thus downloads, amongst GetJar users.

The success of our store lies in users finding the apps they want, regardless of where it’s available. With that in mind we launched an effort to grow our catalog to give a more complete picture of the Android app ecosystem. Over the last few months, we began adding the top 50,000 free apps available in Android Market, and making that information available to visitors of GetJar.

We’ve added icons, screenshots and text, but most importantly to you, we did not add the application directly into GetJar. We realize how important your intellectual property is to you, which is why these apps link to the entry directly on Android Market. When a user clicks the download button on Getjar.com/Your_app, they get redirected to your app on Android Market.

In addition to growing our catalog for our customers we are providing free marketing to these apps in a variety of ways. One, as we continue to fine tune our store we’re seeing our Android Traffic double month-to-month, which means more users looking for great apps like yours. Two, these ingested apps are built into our recommendation system meaning that we will be showing your apps to our users, even though you’ve may never have heard of us.

As a developer you also have the opportunity to upload your application directly to GetJar, making it available to a wider audience and on devices that may not have access to Android Market. We’ve seen that, consistently, by uploading directly to GetJar you remove a click a user would have to make, thus increasing conversion rates up to 50%. You can add your app to our store by setting up an account at developer.getjar.com. Once you have an account, you can migrate control of your app’s content from us to you. If you have any troubles, simply let us know.

We’re very pleased to congratulate The Salvation Army for being a finalist for the “Most Effective Mobile Charity Campaign” award at the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards. Through a partnership with mobile marketing company DIDMO, GetJar successfully launched the app and helped it rack up 190,000 downloads in 6 weeks. Even better than that, 6.2% responded to a “Donate $10 now,” and 3.9% of users responded to a call for volunteer submissions.

DIDMO, creators of the award-winning Magmito mobile application creation solution, designed the app for The Salvation Army, USA Southern Territory. The app, The Salvation Army Daily Cup Social Justice, which works on all phones, addresses important social justice issues through building awareness and encouraging donations of time and money from mobile users. The app has a regularly updated blog feed with news not commonly found on most other media outlets. It also highlights important information on social justice including sobering statistics and content on human trafficking, hunger, homelessness, disaster, and HIV/AIDS, to name a few.

Everyone involved with the application is very pleased with the results:

“We’re absolutely thrilled to be recognized by such a distinguished panel of mobile industry judges for our important work alongside DIDMO and GetJar in bringing attention to social justice issues globally. This nomination will help us continue to spread the word.” -C. Mark Brown, Major, Community Relations and Development Secretary for The Salvation Army USA Southern Territory.

“We are proud of the app and the important work we accomplished with The Salvation Army and GetJar. Win or lose (the award), we certainly feel like winners today for championing a cause we believe in – engaging the mobile generation in the fight for social justice.” -Ted Iannuzzi, CEO, DIDMO.

“Our objectives with the app were to inform, educate and engage a global, mobile audience in the fight against social injustices.” = Berenice Kalan, Marketing Director, GetJar.

As we focus a lot of effort on GetJar Gold, this blog has been a little light on updates. But, I can’t say this enough, good things are coming! In the meantime, here’s a quick roundup of Android dev tips:

-Tehkseven has released 12 packs with more than fourthousand free, gorgeous icons packs

-Android Police has a preview of the newest release ADT 14 And SDK Tools r14 that show off some really impressive improvements.

-.net magazine has 10 ‘amazing’ Android development tips that are worth a quick look.

-Locai learns that hard way that something as small as auto-correct can kill the launch of your app.